Come to Daddy? Claiming Chris Cunningham for British Art Cinema
James Leggott
Journal of British Cinema and Television 13.2 (2016): 243–261
Abstract:
Twenty years after he came to prominence via a series of provocative, ground-breaking music videos, Chris Cunningham remains a troubling, elusive figure within British visual culture. His output – which includes short films, advertisements, art gallery commissions, installations, music production and a touring multi-screen live performance – is relatively slim, and his seemingly slow work rate (and tendency to leave projects uncompleted or unreleased) has been a frustration for fans and commentators, particularly those who hoped he would channel his interests and talents into a full-length ‘feature’ film project. There has been a diverse critical response to his musical sensitivity, his associations with UK electronica culture – and the Warp label in particular – his working relationship with Aphex Twin, his importance within the history of the pop video and his deployment of transgressive, suggestive imagery involving mutated, traumatised or robotic bodies. However, this article makes a claim for placing Cunningham within discourses of British art cinema. It proposes that the many contradictions that define and animate Cunningham’s work – narrative versus abstraction, political engagement versus surrealism, sincerity versus provocation, commerce versus experimentation, art versus craft, a ‘British’ sensibility versus a transnational one – are also those that typify a particular terrain of British film culture that falls awkwardly between populism and experimentalism.
Keywords: British art cinema; Chris Cunningham; cinematic bodies; film and
music; music video.
Towards the end of Chris Cunningham’s disorientating short film Rubber Johnny (2005), the flesh of the titular character – a grotesquely deformed man/child played by the director himself under layers of prosthetics – appears to explode repeatedly onto the camera lens.1 The frenetic editing and electronic score momentarily slows down to allow the viewer to perceive a series of unsettling tableaux of rearranged body parts and unidentifiable viscera. It so happens that the reassembled body is the dominant motif of Cunningham’s moving image
work of the twenty-first century. Elsewhere, in his video for the 2006 song ‘Sheena Is a Parasite’ by The Horrors, a woman interrupts her feverish dancing to the music with a dress-lifting manoeuvre that seems to direct her unleashed innards directly towards the camera. In
Spectral Musicians (c.2011), shown to date only as part of Cunningham’s live performances, incision marks are tracked along a child’s body before it implodes in a blaze of light, as if subject to an alien invasion and autopsy. In his looped video installation piece Flex (2000), a naked man and woman, suspended in a watery space, lock into a rhythm that alternates between intimacy and the brutalisation of each other’s flesh.
These depictions of unstable, brutalised bodies are useful encapsulations of Cunningham’s anatomical obsessions and attraction towards transgressive imagery. But they are equally suggestive of his body of creative work, which is similarly messy, decentred, fractured. In the examples given above, Cunningham’s interest lies not merely in the evisceration of the human form, but its reassembly; his productions often describe rhythmic cycles of implosion and restoration. There is a warning, perhaps, for anyone attempting to impose coherence or
categorisation upon a body of work defined so strongly by a tension between order and chaos.
Twenty years after he came to prominence via a series of provocative, ground-breaking music videos, Cunningham (who was born in 1970) remains an elusive figure within British visual culture. His output – which includes short films, advertisements, art gallery commissions, installations, music production and a touring multiscreen live performance – is relatively slim, and his seemingly slow work rate (and tendency to leave projects uncompleted or unreleased) has been a frustration for fans and commentators, particularly those who hoped he would channel his interests and talents into a full-length ‘feature’ film project.2 He has certainly not lacked critical acclaim and recognition, and there has been a diverse response to his musical sensitivity, his associations with UK electronica culture (and the Warp label in particular), his working relationship with Aphex Twin, his importance within the history of the pop video and his deployment of transgressive, suggestive imagery involving mutated, traumatised or robotic bodies.
Such is his creative idiosyncrasy, few would dispute Cunningham’s singularity as an artist, even when querying his worth and significance. But there has been less agreement on exactly which artistic or industrial contexts his work fits within most comfortably. Diane
Railton and Paul Watson, in their analysis of the music video form, acknowledge Cunningham, as do many others, as a video auteur, but warn that the ‘unearthing of thematic and stylistic consistencies across numerous instances of any one [music video] director’s output is incredibly rare’; furthermore, the anomalous notion of a video author risks reducing the form to a ‘sub-genre of film’ (2011: 68), marginalising the role of music, performance and other creative personnel. Alternatively, one might query whether the term ‘music
video’ is a sufficient descriptor of productions such as Rubber Johnny and Flex that are not dominated by a single track (or named after one), yet are still ‘attuned to music’ (Fetveit 2011: 173). Indeed, commentaries on his output – whether academic discussion or YouTube
comments on uploads/recordings – often betray a desire to project a straightforward trajectory upon his career, or to claim him for a particular sphere of creativity. Thus, for example, the film-maker Richard Stanley, in a survey of contemporary developments in horror cinema written for an academic anthology, noted Cunningham’s beginnings in the realm of technical effects for fantasy cinema, and anticipated (wrongly) that his late 1990s music videos would
augur a return to genre film-making (2002: 187–8). He was not the only observer to witness Cunningham’s feeding on the ‘extremes of cinematic shorthand’ (Hanson 2006: 15), which also extended to science fiction (All Is Full of Love (1998)), film noir (Only You (1997)) and
British social realism (No More Talk (1997)). In contrast, the art curator Norman Rosenthal, in justification of his inclusion of Cunningham’s aptly named video installation Flex in his Apocalypse exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2000, described him as a ‘celebrated young maker of advertising and music videos, who is now choosing quite deliberately to enter the discourse of contemporary art’ (2000: 28).
While this may well have been true, in retrospect this ‘legit gallery status’ (Romney 2005: 34) is debateable, given that Cunningham’s subsequent activities, for all their possible engagement with tropes and developments within contemporary art practice, have mostly taken place beyond the establishments and spaces associated with it. The picture is further complicated by the (one assumes) author-endorsed statements on the back cover of his commercially released Rubber
Johnny DVD (with accompanying booklet of ‘original artwork’), which describes the six-minute work as a ‘hallucinatory experimental video’ by ‘the UK’s most imaginative filmmaker’. Although ‘experimental video’ is used here partly in reference to Cunningham’s continuing collaboration with the electronic musician Aphex Twin, and therefore
to emphasise the product’s kinship with music culture (and electronica in particular), the word ‘experimental’ is of course loaded with associations of radical, avant-garde activity, and in this context ‘video’ casts off its connections with the pop music industry and instead links
to a tradition of British video art.
Published interviews and profiles have frequently evoked – if not directly stated – the obvious parallels between Cunningham’s attraction to shape-shifting imagery and disorientating, animation-like editing strategies, and his own professional fluidity between media, genres and artistic worlds; for Laura Frahm, for example, his work can be
conceived as a ‘permanent reflection about a world that is in a state of endless flux’ (2015: 163). Profiles of Cunningham tend to describe his early work in special effects production, starting when he was still a teenager. He was involved in design and technical roles on
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) and Nightbreed (1990), and was the main alien sculptor on Alien 3 (1992), before Stanley Kubrick employed him to lead a robot design department on the pre-production of A.I. (eventually directed by Steven Spielberg). During his time on
A.I., he developed an interest in the synchronisation of music and movement and moved into music video production as a tentative step towards film-making. In the accompanying booklet to the 2003 compilation DVD The Work of Chris Cunningham, issued as part of the ‘Directors Label’ series (which also included Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Jonathan Glazer, Anton Corbijn and Mark Romanek), he told an interviewer: ‘I love anatomy. I love the human form, I always have. That’s why I got into painting and sculpting, that’s why I became interested in prosthetics and why I make films about bodies. The one thing that was missing was sound’ (Cunningham 2003).
After a self-funded video for the electronic music act Autechre, involving an insect-like machine, proved disappointing, through his inability to turn a visually abstract idea into a piece of film, he gained a number of commissions for videos and advertisements. In
interviews, he has devalued much of this work, citing a perfectionist and uncompromising streak that made mainstream commissions for the likes of Madonna difficult, and openly expressing in the accompanying booklet his disappointment with some of the eight
examples he selected for the ‘Directors Label’ DVD. He has also expressed frustration that, in the age of YouTube, he cannot exercise control over dissemination, complaining that: ‘If there’s something you’ve done it’ll be on the fucking internet’ (Dombal 2005). In 1999
he announced a transition from music videos to film direction, but a planned adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) was as ultimately fruitless as other feature projects to which he would allude in the next fifteen years. Originally intended as a short film for FilmFour, but seemingly unviable because of its content (Bidder 2000), Flex was
ultimately commissioned by the Anthony D’Offay gallery. Although he distinguished it at the time from the ‘puerility’ and comedic impulses of previous collaborations with Aphex Twin, he also emphasised that ‘at the end of the day I just make films and this is just another venue’.
But he would again express disappointment with the realisation of Flex, including only three minutes of the seventeen-minute running length on his DVD, and in an interview with Sean O’Hagan in the Guardian, 18 April 2010, he described his move into live performance
from 2005 onwards – with shows consisting of a three-screen live ‘mix’ and re-edit of released and unreleased work – as ‘the closest I can get to what I want to do: the visceral sound of a live show but massive screens like a cinema’. He has also rejected the benefits of egalitarian online platforms such as YouTube in disseminating his work to a wide
audience, instead lamenting to O’Hagan the decontextualisation and loss of image quality involved: ‘Why spend three years on a short film for it to end up being shown out-of-sync on a shitty format?’ Promoting his 2012 multimedia Jaqapparatus installation for Audi City,
Cunningham seemed resigned to his outsider status: ‘What I’m doing these days doesn’t really fit anywhere. A film company wouldn’t [fund me] because it doesn’t fit their business model. That’s why people say, “What have you been doing?’’’ (Anon. 2012).
As illustrated by such interview statements about his resistance to the expectations of his becoming a ‘director’ in the traditional sense of a feature-length storyteller, Cunningham’s career lacks a tidy narrative of creative evolution. The 1990s is now recognised as a boom period for UK music video production, an era in which the ‘character and quantity of music videos produced were stimulated by the policies of British terrestrial programmers and
by the emergence of a new generation of independent film-makers who sought pleasure within their artisanal practice’ (Caston 2014: 13). However, Cunningham has not followed the pathways of others who used advertisements and music videos as a nursery slope for a
commercial directing career (such as Ridley Scott, Guy Ritchie and Jonathan Glazer), or who ‘graduated’ from intellectually orientated or personal short films to ‘arthouse’ features (for example, Peter Greenaway, Sally Potter and Lynn Ramsay). As tempting as it might
be to celebrate Cunningham as a maverick presence without obvious parallel or precedent in British popular culture, I want instead to draw him into discourses around British art cinema. I will offer various definitions of art cinema in due course, but my argument here is indebted to recent scholarship responding sensitively to the various currents and impulses that characterise contemporary British cinema. My proposition is that the many contradictions that define and animate Cunningham’s work – narrative versus abstraction, political
engagement versus surrealism, sincerity versus provocation, commerce versus experimentation, art versus craft, a ‘British’ sensibility versus a transnational one – are also those that typify a particular terrain of British film culture that falls awkwardly between populism and experimentalism.
From music videos to art cinema: figures and landscape
Defining a national variant of the already contested concept of art cinema is no easy task. European art cinema has tended to be defined in terms of a rejection of the style and storytelling methods of Hollywood cinema, or as a strategic institutional response by European film-makers. Although it is difficult to find equivalences in British film
culture to the various mid-century European movements associated with broader artistic and literary developments, it is possible to locate a current of sophistication and exploration British film culture, even if film-makers were moving against the tide. As Brian Hoyle (2012) notes, both the influential documentary movement of the 1930s and 1940s, and the less internationally significant ‘kitchen sink’ new wave of the 1950s and 1960s, contrasted sharply with the modernist experiments of contemporaneous continental film-makers. Buoyed in part by the arrival of Channel 4, the 1980s was a productive period for directors
such as Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Sally Potter, Terence Davies and Mike Leigh, many of whom graduated from avant-garde or low budget work in the previous decade. For John Hill, this wave of film-makers made it ‘much easier to identify a recognisably British
art cinema and see it as a significant strand of British and, indeed, European filmmaking’ (2000: 18). For Hoyle, British art cinema of the last quarter of the twentieth century can be characterised on the one hand as a ‘belated continuation of classic European art cinema